


for a given value of 'human'

by piedpiper



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Body Horror, Cecil Doesn't Even Know What Cecil Is Okay, Cecil Headcanons, Cecil Might be Human or Inhuman, Cecil is Human, Cecil is Mostly Human, Character Study, Gen, Headcanon, just a little bit though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 15:38:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1310113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piedpiper/pseuds/piedpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil is fairly sure he's human. As human as anyone else in Night Vale, at any rate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for a given value of 'human'

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this relatively early in my Night Vale fandomship, when I was still trying to figure out where my personal Cecil headcanon lay on the human/inhuman scale. This was, and still is, the only position of Cecil on that scale that makes any sense at all to me.

Cecil is fairly sure he's human. As human as anyone else in Night Vale, at any rate. He remembers having quite a normal childhood, with a family and school and a few friends (who grew fewer, for diverse reasons, as he grew older) and the occasional chanting circle and ritual small animal sacrifice, and one doesn't get much more normal than that. He _remembers_ these things, he does, he _does._ He remembers them as well as he can remember anything (which is shakily at best). The past is a fiction, in any case, he reminds himself. His might well be, starting from any point up from when Carlos arrived, or possibly after. He can't remember anymore.

He does sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, unable to tell whether any of his body parts are in the places where they should be. He can't remember by the next morning whether they were or not, because you know how it is when you wake up in the middle of the night and then fall back asleep. But everything generally seems to work okay, so he doesn't worry about it too much. Sometimes he watches the bones in his hands gently shift places under his skin for hours on end, drifting over and across each other like twigs in a puddle in response to no muscle movements whatsoever. It doesn't seem to hurt or cause any lasting damage, and it's oddly relaxing to watch. 

(Cecil is one of the 47% of Night Vale residents who does possess pain-sensing nerves. He is often mildly annoyed by that fact.) 

Sometimes he looks in the mirror in the mornings and hardly recognizes his own face. It's not as though the face in the reflection couldn't be his. It has a nose of the kind he remembers having, and ears and hair and two normal human eyes and one normal human mouth with perfectly unworrying teeth. It's just that it all seems _off_ somehow, as if all his features have shifted their position by millimeters overnight. Possibly they have. Possibly it is only his perception of himself that has changed. Who knows?

Cecil is _sure_ that he is human, as human as any other resident of Night Vale. Somewhere behind the curtains of normality in the shredded and tattered back rooms of his mind, there is a message chipped on the concrete wall of his consciousness that says: _You are human._ Do not forget that. When you are engulfed by one of the rolling waves of despair and nothingness that sweep the town periodically, do not forget that you are human. When you stare up into the endless night sky and can almost believe that you are only a buzzing cloud of neutrons bound loosely together by decaying energy, do not forget that you are human. You are a bundle of meat and bone and chemicals, descended from apes and held together by instincts and ancestral fears. You are warm, you have density and a given shape, you eat boiled eggs for breakfast (and do not dwell on the fact that you do this because toast has been outlawed by the City Council along with all other wheat and wheat by-products) and have involuntary sweaty palms around a certain perfect and gorgeous scientist. When you have the Dreams, when those unpleasant things happen in the park and the darkness swirls its way up past your elbows, when you wake up in City Hall after retraining unable to remember your own address or how to move your splinted fingers, remember that the emotions and sensations you are feeling are because _you are human._ That is the singular, only thing you have left if you hope to cling to normality.

Cecil's body is not entirely his own, no, not after all these years, because that would be just unrealistic. Maybe... about eighty-three percent his, which actually puts him at nearly sixteen percent higher on the Body Ownership Scale than the town average.That's pretty good, he thinks. And in any case, it's what's on the inside that matters.

Cecil is definitely ( _definitely)_  your average, ordinary human. As far, that is, as he can remember. And that should definitely be what counts, right?


End file.
